this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025

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Music Production

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DAW options? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 days ago by NineMileTower@lemmy.world to c/musicproduction@sh.itjust.works

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Would anyone be willing to lay out their experiences with DAWs? Preferably free ones? I tried waveform, but I'm thinking I'm going to use Cakewalk. A lot of people say Reaper, but the UI seems lackluster. What do yo think?

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[–] pebbles@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

I use Ardour on Linux. Everything works pretty great for me. I use the LSP plugins which provide all the basic for free like eq and compression. Then I use Airwindows plugins for all the fun distortion is reverb and color. If ya need a free soft synth I'd use surgeXT it's all ya need.

I mainly record Audio in from synthesizers and real instruments. I also accepted that none of my old windows VTSs would easily work on Linux, so I didn't try to port them. Though I hear folks have had some success with running them in a comparability layer. I moved from Ableton on Windows to Ardour on Fedora Linux.

All is free, though I personally paid for Ardour cause I like to support projects I use. And $40 is still the cheapest daw around.

[–] allo@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 days ago

FL Mobile anyone?

[–] ma1w4re@lemm.ee 8 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I use Reaper for all sound/music related stuff, never failed me once. It has real nice selection of plugins, if you want more you can either get free plugins made by reaper community on the forum, or elsewhere. Ui honestly is just perfect for me, I wouldn't have it any other way.

[–] rigatti@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago

Also about the UI, it's extremely flexible and skinnable. So you can make it look almost however you want.

[–] NineMileTower@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I'll have to mess around with it. The UI looks a bit daunting compared to Cakewalk, but people seem to enjoy it.

[–] Revered_Beard@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I've been using Reaper daily for 15 years. If you run into any issues that you can't figure out, feel free to reach out, I'm happy to answer questions.

[–] NineMileTower@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I'm trying to use MIDI drums and I have no idea how. I've inserted a MIDI synth track, so I should be able to do drums. Is there some sort of virtual instrument plugins I can download?

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Like connecting an electronic kit or pads on a controller? Or just triggering hits on your timeline? Either way yes there are several VSTs but your DAW probably comes with a drum machine or sampler that can do a lot. Plenty of free drums samples out there. Could you elaborate more on what you want to achieve?

[–] NineMileTower@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I would compose the drum tracks on the timeline for now. I may get a MIDI keyboard in the future though. I think VST is the term I needed to learn there

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

What DAW are you using? Most should be able to accomplish what you're after without any plugins. Is there a sampler? Like a virtual instrument that lets you play different audio files? You could trigger them via midi on the piano roll (timeline).

Edit: the only VST for drums I find useful is XO but that's just to manage a large sample library. You don't need that now.

[–] NineMileTower@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Reaper. I figured out how to use the piano roll. I found a synth, but no drum samples

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 days ago

I don't know Reaper but you probably want to load a sampler. I'm sure there's one included.

Edit: some quick googling brought up this script

[–] ma1w4re@lemm.ee 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You can try doing It this way, but I'm 100% sure on that, I mostly used my guitar with an Audio interface and a midi keyboard:

Connect your drum kit using MIDI-OUT MIDI-IN sockets (on some devices USB is used for midi signal)
In settings there's a menu for all connected devices, make sure your drums are in that list and are active
Create a new track and choose your drum kit as midi input device
Open piano roll and check on drums which notes are triggered by which drum
Load multiple ReaSamploMatic plugins one for each drum and configure them for the notes that the drum kit is triggering

Or, if your kit has audio outputs then just connect it to your interface, it's plug and play in this case.

Once again, I never used drums, so it's just what I would try to do if I had to connect the drums.

[–] NineMileTower@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I explained wrong. I do not have a midi drum controller, I just want to make a drum track with my mouse and can't figure out how to find drums or if they are even there yet

[–] ma1w4re@lemm.ee 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Addendum:

When I first started using reaper, I followed this guide on drums setup

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWn4nUTRjrY

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K34kQBX2gKc

Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFuR7K1HSNw

[–] NineMileTower@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

I'll give it a shot. Thanks!

[–] ma1w4re@lemm.ee 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Oh. The plugin you're looking for is either a sampler or a drum machine. I prefer samplers, there's a handy one comes with Reaper called ReaSamploMatic.

Either find some free VST plugin for a drum machine on the internet, or make one yourself using the sampler and some free samples off the internet.

I'll explain how I do it and used to do it.

There's a few ways to do that, my preferred way is this, it's a bit hard to draw but it is way easier for mixing:

Create a new track, name it Drums
Create a few more tracks, each for Kick, Snare, HiHat, each for toms and your preferred cymbals.
On the Drums track, there's a button on the left lower side of the track that looks like a plus sign on mouse over, clicking it will make Drums track a folder for all tracks below it.
In each drum track you've created load the ReaSamploMatic plugin, and load drums samples (that you should have downloaded somewhere, it's easy to find them especially on reddit) into the plugin.
Pretty much done. Ctrl+click+drag on the timeline will create a roll, double click the roll and draw the notes within.

Now save the Drums folder as a template for future use.

A bit more easier setup, but I find it lacking a bit during mixing:

Create a single track called Drums
Load multiple ReaSamploMatic plugins into it
Load samples into each plugin
Configure each plugin to use specific note on the piano roll, so that you can draw the entire drum kit midi inside a single roll, usually it's the setting that has a range of note X to note Y.
Create the roll, edit the roll.

Your best friend soon will become Kenny from REAPER Mania YouTube channel, he has a truckload of extremely valuable content about reaper and music production, here's one of the vids about creating a drum machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZg1LFFhqms

He has a few good vids about drums, just look up "reaper Mania drums" on YouTube.

[–] NineMileTower@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

That sounds so complicated. Cakewalk has all the drum kit sounds on one piano roll. No need for multiple tracks within the same track

[–] ma1w4re@lemm.ee 1 points 3 days ago

Once again, its just the way I prefer it. You can easily make it all drums on one roll, as I explained in the message to which you've replied...

[–] bizzle@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I've used Logic and Reaper just at a hobbyist level, honestly I prefer Reaper

[–] rigatti@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago

Seconding Reaper. It will do anything you want it to do, and it's light, fast, and cheap.

[–] NineMileTower@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I'll give Reaper a shot. It just looks intimidating.

[–] Boozilla@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 days ago

It took me a long time to switch from Cakewalk to Reaper for this very reason. With a little time and practice I learned to love Reaper's streamlined interface.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 days ago

I'm a noob when it comes to digital music, but I've used LMMS and Ardour before.

I like LMMS a lot, because it's relatively simple, so it doesn't completely overload you with all kinds of features. Unfortunately, this can of course mean that certain features may be missing. For example, if I remember correctly, you can set a given beat (like 3/4 beat and such) and you can also 'automate' changing of that beat during the song, but it will not re-layout the measures to match that beat.
Well, and speaking of automation, LMMS is pretty cool in that regard, because you can automate anything that's got a control in the UI. So, automation means you can have it e.g. turn up the volume at measure 53 over the course of 4 measures and stuff like that.

Ardour is definitely a lot more powerful, a lot more feature-rich. I definitely wasn't at the point, where I could really appreciate that. It was also somewhat less stable, so it would crash every so often. Since it would dutifully restore all your work, I wouldn't call that a deal breaker, but it can be annoying.

[–] LucasWaffyWaf@lemmy.world 5 points 4 days ago

I'm currently using LMMS - it's fine for my needs, but the lack of VST3 support is deffo worth noting. I'll have to graduate to something better soon.

[–] breaks@lemmy.studio 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Bitwig Studio! Made from former Ableton devs so it's similar but the workflow is amazing for modulation and sound design. Plus Linux support. Not free but you can rent-to-own via splice (you do not need an active splice sounds sub).

!bitwig@lemmy.studio

Edit: oh and it can also sandbox your plugins (either individually, by company, or all together) so having a vst crash doesn't bring down your whole project.

[–] astrsk@fedia.io 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Any performance hit on the sandboxing? Even just a few ms latency?

[–] breaks@lemmy.studio 1 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

That's a good question but not one I can adequately answer. I'm currently mostly using a low-end setup so I'm just sandboxing my plugins as one.

[–] afk_strats@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Long time Cakewalk user. It used to be good when it was paid but the stability isn't there anymore.

I'm going to save this post because I need some Linux recommendations.... Though I worry that my paid VST stuff won't work :(

[–] breaks@lemmy.studio 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Have you tried Bitwig?

[–] afk_strats@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

No but it looks cool

[–] NineMileTower@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

What sort of issues? Back in like 2004-2005 me and my buddy would use ProTracks, which is the same software I believe. It was pretty solid back then.

[–] afk_strats@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

I used Cakewalk Producer? back up to the mid 2010s. About that time, they made it free and I tried installing and using the free stuff. I had a really solid setup which had worked really well with the older Cakewalk stuff. I just kept getting crashes. It was interrupting my workflow. I basically gave up on the whole thing and music production in general. Sad in retrospect

[–] rah 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Rosegarden + Ardour

All I ever use.

[–] NineMileTower@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I'm running windows. Don't tell Lemmy.

[–] rah -1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Ardour runs on Windows.

[–] NineMileTower@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Is it free?

[–] rah 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yes, it's free as in free beer but most importantly also free as in free speech.

[–] NineMileTower@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

God bless the USA!